Hands-on Activity for Author’s Purpose and Genre
Author’s purpose can be a challenge for students! Helping them wrap their heads around the author’s intent for writing something is easier said than done!
So when I teach author’s purpose, I try to connect it to genre! This makes so much more sense to kids and helps them use it to comprehend, too.
On top of that connection to genre, including some hands-on activities and opportunities to practice will help students move their learning into long-term memory so they don’t forget it all tomorrow!
For example, if someone wants to tell a twisted story that will leave people on the edge of their seats, they likely end up writing a fictional story for entertainment.
Overall, students understanding of author’s purpose may seem minor, but it has some substantial impacts on student comprehension!
Understanding the genre and purpose influences how we read a text.
As I’ve mentioned over the past few months, you need to summarize genres differently and evaluate different literary elements based on the genre.
👉 Accurately identifying the genre before reading …
can help students think about what they might expect to find as they read the text. For example, they might expect a poem to have stanzas and rhythm. Whereas they would expect a nonfiction text to have sections and supporting graphics.
Need more tools for teaching genre? Get the Teaching Reading by Genre Teaching Guide & Tools here!
Teaching author’s purpose with hands-on activities
Here’s a fun activity for working through author’s purpose with short paragraphs:
💡 Introduce students to the different types of author’s purpose: to entertain, to inform, to persuade, and to explain how.
💡 Give students various paragraphs, each with a different purpose. Have them look it over and identify the purpose.
💡 Then, talk about the clues that gave the purpose away. Was it the genre? Characters? Organizational structure?
It helps to turn them into an anchor chart so you can refer back to it later!
Get these paragraphs and more in the Author’s Purpose Posters and Activities Pack!
This resource includes posters of each type of purpose, word wall cards, a sorting activity (like discussed above), and texts with comprehension questions.
Giving your students enough practice in this area can be difficult, too. Short paragraphs with differentiated, scaffolded questions can help you move students forward one step at a time!
These author’s purpose task cards are part of my Author’s Purpose Unit. Grab that, an anchor chart activity, and modeled passage here!
